Syncronizing Remote Users Laptops to their Network Shares

[RabbieBurns]

For all intents and purposes, our teachers are pretty much remote users. They take their laptops home, do all their work at home, and bring them in to utilise their productions in the classroom.

 

Since we moved to windows 7, we moved away from redirecting their My Documents to their folder on the staff network share, as whenever they were actually creating and saving documents, they were away from the network, and as such their My Documents wasnt available (and this redierection not available caused all sorts of issues with XP)

 

Now with 7, Ive partitioned their HD, they have a D: drive where all their work goes, and they are told they need to copy it to their Home Folder on the server to ensure it is backed up hourly etc.

 

Is there anything I can use that will sync their Documents folder to their home folder on the server once they connect to our school network (and only their documents, we let staff keep their Itunes, personal photos, etc etc on their D: Drive, so I dont want that Syncing back to the server)

 

THey all have VPN access to their school Shared folders, but I wouldnt want / trust them to do anything via that, I want something automated. I used Microsoft SyncToy with a couple of staff with XP as an experiment, and it served well, but it was reliant on the staff running it manually. Im looking for something similar to the synctoy from microsoft.. but automatic.. Cheers.

[SYNACK]

Why not simply use redirected folders and offline folders, that works fine with Windows 7. The only issues I have had with it is when it is teamed with libraries, DFS and rubbish networks. Works fine on basic quality 1GB trunked networks but have had it fail when it goes through rubbish old 100mbit switches.

[RabbieBurns]

all our teachers are laptops and are wireless. So they might have them open for 50 minutes while they teach, and then close them again for the rest of the day till they decide they need to use them agian.

 

They never connect via copper, but all the access points are connected via decent infrastructure.

 

All i would be wanting is the Documents folder, so anything they have in any of their other libraries im not interested in.

[SYNACK]

Yeap, so long as they are not saving 1GB movie files or anything to their docs folders and they are synced up initially over a wire if they have lots of Docs then it should be fine. By lots I mean 25GB+. Wireless for everything sounds like hell.

 

We have teachers with 80GB+ of docs synced up fin in this way over the wire, you just need to get the initial sync done and enable it over slow links if using wireless and it should work alright even syncing over VPN when avalible.

[RabbieBurns]

cool thanks, ill have a play with some policies next week.

[strawberry]

not sure if sync toy works in 7 ?

[RabbieBurns]

right ive set this up according to this page Configuring New Offline Files Features for Windows 7 Computers Step-by-Step Guide but it seems to still not be working

 

I have redirected the Documents folder to \\server\share\ and set it to use a different foldername for every user.

 

I have then created a \\server\share\rabbieburns\documents folder and put some documents in there.

 

I have also put some files and folders in the C:\users\rabbieburns\documents folder on my laptop

 

But this offline files thing doesnt seem to be working?

 

Is there something Im missing?? Cheers

[SYNACK]

Have you set the file path up \\server\share\%username%\documents in the administratively assigned offline files bit under user policys?

[sted]

have you turned on offline file sharing on both pc and user policy?

[RabbieBurns]

@sted I just followed the howto guide from technet which seemed to only do redirection in one, and offline folders in the other?

 

@SYNACK yes, ive done that but still not showing.

 

Actually, when I click on Documents it doesn't seem to be redirecting to the server share at all, let alone syncing anything

[SYNACK]

Does the redirected folder have the owner set to the logon account that you are using. If the folder and files are not 'owned' by the user then windows will refuse to redirect them. This could be a chunk of the issue. Also check using the RSoP snapin to see if it is being applied properly and check the folder itself by navigating to its parent, checking for the little green circle on the folder.

[RabbieBurns]

hmm in RSOP it shows:

 

Thursday, 12 May 2011 1:01:51 PM

 

Folder Redirection failed due to the error listed below.

Cannot complete this function.

 

I am the owner of the network share folder in question.

 

As for the GP itself, i have the setting 'Basic : Redirect everyones folder to the same location' and then the next part is set to 'redirect to the users home folder'

[SYNACK]

Have you checked the event logs for clues, it is much better in 7 and may reveil the cause.

[RabbieBurns]

I did a search on here and found a thread that said it was because I had already logged onto my laptop and already had a local profile. So I had to delete and recreate my local profile and it seems to have worked. Redirection works but offline files is getting access denied, ill need to investigate that part.

 

But the fact it required a new profile makes it kind of impossible to roll this out to staff.

 

But at least my documents are on the way to becoming nice and synced.

[chrbb]

I have a simple batch file to x copy work from a 'backup' folder in my documents to an equilialent folder in the staff folders on the server. It can be set to run as a scheduled task but our staff run it at log on

[SYNACK]

I did a search on here and found a thread that said it was because I had already logged onto my laptop and already had a local profile. So I had to delete and recreate my local profile and it seems to have worked. Redirection works but offline files is getting access denied, ill need to investigate that part.

 

But the fact it required a new profile makes it kind of impossible to roll this out to staff.

 

But at least my documents are on the way to becoming nice and synced.

 

Weird, I'm sure that I have not run into that requirement before as I have had local profiles that I implemented it on afterwards. It was for a weird setup though, had the desktop, favorites, music etc redirected into the documents folder which is then synced. The profile is then local for everything else so that it is roaming but only to a certain extent making it work nicely on the laptops even with the patchy network. At anyrate when I set it up initially it did manage to do a redirect after an initial logon but it may have een due to the fact that the local one was empty. Have you set the redirect policy to move any existing files from the old location as that may help it.

[RabbieBurns]

the access denied was due to fact i enabled encryption. I had to open sync center and click on decrypt. It now seems to be syncing great.

 

The redirect policy is set to move yes. Ive tested on my desktop too and it failed again. Although I think i figured it out. Previously I have had Documents redirected from c:\users\blah\documents to d:\users\documents\blah so Im wondering if that might be causing the issue because there is no c:\users\ folders

[sted]

the access denied was due to fact i enabled encryption. I had to open sync center and click on decrypt. It now seems to be syncing great.

 

The redirect policy is set to move yes. Ive tested on my desktop too and it failed again. Although I think i figured it out. Previously I have had Documents redirected from c:\users\blah\documents to d:\users\documents\blah so Im wondering if that might be causing the issue because there is no c:\users\ folders

 

if your documents folder as redirected and synced they will by default end up on c:\csc or something similar as thats the document cache location they dont exist in the location they normally would

[SYNACK]

if your documents folder as redirected and synced they will by default end up on c:\csc or something similar as thats the document cache location they dont exist in the location they normally would

 

That bit is behind the scenes though, it still appears for all intensive purposes to be looking at the network, even if your offline.

[RabbieBurns]

i dont have a CSC folder on my laptop, and indeed, one of my other questions was gonna be, where does this offlines files policy store things?

 

Am I right in thinkking, if im going to deploy this policy for teachers, that i should be thiking of enabling encryption?

 

wherre in fact does this remote policy move stuff to?

 

At the moment, we partiton staff laptops with c: and a D: partition, and redirecct their profile to D:, which means when they come to us with issues we can just reimage the C: and hve the back up and running in 10 minutes.

 

I'd like to keep this option, so that I could specify where the offline files were, so we are free to blitz the C: drive at will...

[SYNACK]

@RabbieBurns - Yes bitlocker on the drives is a very good idea if using offline files or even if your not. The policy does not move stuff just keeps a secondary copy of it locally for use when offline or if the link is slow to speed up file access. I don't think that you can just move the CSC folder from one to the other with a reinstall given that it is a database tied to user accounts. The beauty though is that because everything is actually on the server and just cached on the laptop you just need to make sure you do a full sync before killing it and it will just re-sync back down to the freshly installed laptop. It does mean a slightly longer time after rebuild but as it does it automagicly you can just tell the staff to logon normally on the network ad let it sync in the background over the course of the day.

 

The CSC folder is hidden and locked down under c:\windows\csc

[RabbieBurns]

What I do at the moment, since I have migrated everyone to Win7, is to partition their laptop HD, and redirect evertying that was in c:\users to d:\users, and told them that anything that was important and wanted backed up, they had top copy from their D: drive to their N: network share.

 

They are all good at this, and it makes reimaging their C: drive when they get a virus etc a doddle...

 

We allow staff to keep their itunes library etc in their Music Folder, and their photos in their Pictures folder, etc, and obviously they know they are responsible for all of that (copytight, backups, etc), but again, we redirect it to the D: just so we can blitz the C: without much thought.

 

So with this offline files, it seems i can sync a laptop folder to their network share. I agree that it doesnt really matter whwere its located once its synced, its the problem that everything in documents is now redirected to d:\username\documents that is causing the issue.

 

Nonetheless, all the teachers are due a new laptop at the end of the year anyway, so I guess as long as I have it sorted by then, it will do!

[SYNACK]

Not sure about the issues that the existing redirect may cause but you can redirect the subfolders like music and pictures seporatly so you could concevibly keep those redirected to the d: keeping cruft off the server and still keping the experience reasonably seamless.